Si-hyun set down her fountain pen and leaned back deeply into her chair.
Her gaze swept indifferently over the two men, tracking the distinct tremors rippling across their faces.
"Generally, the core of criminal liability rests on distribution and supply," Si-hyun said, her voice dropping flatly through the sterile air. "Legally speaking, prosecuting a mere user is highly difficult. It falls under a very different legal framework from narcotics offenses."
She paused, letting the silence settle like frost.
"However, if the administration was voluntary and sustained over a long period, the legal picture changes. Particularly if a corporate decision-maker has grown reliant on its efficacy to dictate executive judgments, it ceases to be a personal issue. It mutates into a systemic corporate exposure."
Si-hyun watched their shifting expressions with a detached composure.
"If there are improper financial transactions tangled up with the source, charges of breach of trust or embezzlement will follow. From that moment on, you are no longer considered victims. You will be interpreted as co-conspirators, embedded within an illegal system. In the eyes of the law, voluntary administration equals the assumption of risk."
Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun’s breathing hitched minutely. Beneath the table, he locked his hands together to anchor the trembling.
"If someone—anyone—were to start digging into our legal and medical exposures, what would they actually find?" Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin’s fingers twitched.
His luxurious cufflinks flashed anxiously under the lights, a silent betrayal of the panic churning inside him.
Failing to meet Si-hyun’s cold eyes, he pressed forward, his voice rising in desperation as if trying to grasp an answer dissolving into the empty air.
"Tell me exactly where we are exposed. What is our most vulnerable point, legally or medically?"
Si-hyun fixed her eyes on the crystal ashtray resting on the table.
"The weakest link is always the data trail," she replied calmly. "No matter how accustomed you are to wiping records, everything leaves a trace—routine physicals, emergency room blood panels, personal physician notes, or even a single discarded vial. It all becomes a tether."
She lightly tapped a specific line on the document with the tip of her pen.
Tap.
"The moment someone deliberately submits a sample for chemical analysis, a vague suspicion hardens into irrefutable evidence. In a courtroom, pleading ignorance will not save you. If the absolute peak of the capitalist class recognized the illicit substance's efficacy and secured a continuous supply, it can easily be interpreted as complicity in unauthorized human experimentation."
Si-hyun checked their faces once more.
Veins stood out starkly against the back of Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun’s clenched hands, while a cold sweat beaded against Vice Chairman Jeong Hyun-jin’s forehead.
She continued, completely untroubled, like a spectator observing a tragedy from a safe distance.
"The medical exposure is far more lethal. No one can predict the long-term side effects or the physical collapse an unapproved compound might trigger. If an unpredictable rejection forces either of you into an emergency room, not even Kim & Chang could contain the fallout."
Si-hyun drove the final wedge.
"The second the public learns that a conglomerate chairman has been dependent on an unidentified drug, the group’s stock value will crater, and your public standing will collapse."
Jeong Hyun-jin bit his lip hard. He had never imagined that the price of reclaiming the golden years of his thirties would return as a razor-sharp blade pressed against his throat.
Yet, greed proved more resilient than terror. He desperately wanted a weapon to break the current deadlock with Dr. Lee.
"What if... what if we somehow secure a sample of the compound and reverse-engineer its composition? Wouldn't that serve as a strong defense mechanism for us? Legally and medically, we would hold the data first, allowing us to dictate the response. We wouldn't have to remain on the scientist's leash."
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Instead of an immediate answer, Si-hyun took a slow sip of her cold espresso. The bitter liquid washing over her tongue only sharpened her reason.
To her, it was almost comical to watch these giants continue to dig the very hole they were trapped in, completely blind to its depth, believing it was a path to escape.
"Monopolizing information is the absolute baseline of business," Si-hyun said, her tone carrying a chilling warning. "But make no mistake. The moment you lay hands on that source data, you are not seizing the supplier's leash—you are wrapping your arms around the definitive evidence of your own criminality. Legally, attempting to acquire the manufacturing formula moves your case from simple administration into the territory of attempted illicit manufacturing and distribution."
Internally, she let out a cold scoff.
The law was merely a blueprint to manipulate giants, but the clients who couldn't read the blueprint were bound to be crushed beneath the very structures they built.
Jeong Hyun-jin tapped the marble table aggressively. The chaotic, irregular sound violently fractured the vacuum-like stillness of the room.
He glared at Si-hyun, his eyes heavily bloodshot, as if trying to rip away her calm mask to find Lee Seo-han's shadow lurking behind it.
"I keep getting the feeling that women were never the bastard’s real objective," Hyun-jin muttered, his throat dry as he succumbed to his own spiraling imagination. "That list we served up to him—those women are practically the finest intelligence assets in the country. They understand everything from the group’s secretariat operations to legal frameworks and capital flows. What if Lee Seo-han is draining our network to sever our Achilles' heel?"
In the frantic logic of his panic, Dr. Lee was no longer a mere scientist. He had evolved into an information predator, collecting the dirty secrets of the elite to tighten his leash around their necks.
"Look at it from your perspective, Attorney Kang. Within our group, there are plenty of messy practices that survive only because everyone treats them as routine—things that would cause a massive uproar not just with prosecutors, but all the way to the presidential office if they ever came to light. What exactly could he extract through those women?"
Si-hyun stopped fiddling with her fountain pen. A faint, almost imperceptible curve of a sneer touched her lips before vanishing instantly.
She began to speak, her voice flat and devoid of emotion, as if reading from a pre-arranged file.
"Let us focus on the practices too grand to be called routine, and too atrocious to be called common sense," Si-hyun said. "First, within H Automotive, there is the forced transfer of technology patents from subcontractors during the establishment of the North American battery joint venture. On the surface, it’s framed as a mutual partnership, but in reality, it is corporate theft. The Fair Trade Commission would have a field day with that."
Si-hyun’s gaze shifted to the rigid shoulders of Chairman Jeong Ui-hyun. The Chairman’s eyelids twitched minutely.
"S Group is even more complex," she continued, her words cutting into the festering wounds of the empire like a scalpel. "Vice Chairman, during the consolidation of the distribution network, you inserted a private equity fund into the structure. The shadow capital from that fund was laundered through a gallery in Hannam-dong and tunneled into offshore shell companies, resulting in massive gift tax evasion. If the prosecution's special investigation unit starts pulling at that string, it will never end. If any of the women Dr. Lee met caught a glimpse of those ledgers, the risk becomes catastrophic."
The color drained entirely from Jeong Hyun-jin’s face, but Si-hyun did not stop.
"Beyond that, there are more than enough risks—the unofficial advisory fees paid to specialized consulting firms to dismantle labor unions, or the irregular succession funds generated through illegal inter-affiliate trading. It is all filth masquerading as corporate 'routine' that props up the economy."
Si-hyun set down her pen with a sharp clack, concluding her clinical dissection.
"If Dr. Lee Seo-han truly wants that data, he isn't looking for a lover. He is collecting the definitive evidence required to hold both of you by the throat. And the second those files see the light of day, the paradise you’ve enjoyed will instantly transform into the first page of a criminal indictment."
Jeong Hyun-jin collapsed deep into the plush Nappa leather sofa, but the comfort was entirely gone.
He felt as though the air inside the conference room was thinning out, suffocating him. The venomous words pouring from Si-hyun’s mouth felt like an invisible noose tightening around his neck.
A cold sweat beaded across his forehead, reflecting the sterile lights and forming an unpleasant sheen.
With the magical veil of the Phantom compound temporarily lifted, the exhaustion and utter helplessness of a body past fifty were dragging him down into a bottomless abyss. Every ragged breath he took dragged a cold, primal terror deep into his lungs.
Kang Si-hyun observed his psychological collapse with a detached indifference, glancing down at her wrist as if reviewing a simple legal document. The second hand of her watch moved with a brutal, uncaring regularity.
Paradoxically, Dr. Lee had never established a deep relationship with any of the women they had so carefully arranged for him. He had bypassed their overt seductions and glittering backgrounds with a cool, clinical detachment, treating them like contaminated samples in a pristine laboratory.
But to Jeong Hyun-jin, that pristine, rigid fastidiousness was not a source of comfort—it was the root of a much greater terror.
The fact that Dr. Lee refused to hold them proved he was not a weak creature ruled by human desires. He wasn't looking at the flesh of the women; he was scanning the data bleeding from their lips.
At that exact moment, Jeong Hyun-jin realized the truth.
The glittering offerings they had so eagerly placed before him had transformed into a razor-sharp blade in Lee Seo-han’s hand, pointed straight at their hearts.
Because Lee Seo-han coveted nothing, he was capable of taking everything.